My Top WordPress Pain Points

Don’t get me wrong — I love WordPress. But every time I set up a new site, the same issues keep jumping out at me. So in no particular order, here are some of my top WordPress pain points:

When you switch themes, the menu you’ve set to primary should remain set to primary in the new theme. More likely than not, if you’ve already set a menu to be primary, you want it to remain primary.

Same for widgets. When I switch themes, there should be a good way to easily transfer these over without having to go into your inactive widgets and reset them all. (Widgets are much more complicated, though, so I’m not sure there’s a good solution to this one. Maybe themes should be able to set a “primary widget area?”)

There isn’t an easy way to turn comments off on pages. Comments on pages should be turned off by default.7/7/15 edit: mission accomplished!

The first thing I do when setting up a new site (unless it’s a blog) is go in to my Reading settings and set a page as front. This usually requires a kind of irritating dance, since first I need to create a blank “home” page, then set it as front, and then I can start customizing the rest of my site. I want to be able to do this when setting up my site in the first place, and have WordPress generate a blank page for me so it’s ready to go when I’m dropped into my new dashboard.

I completely agree with you setting up a new site with WordPress requires a ‘Dance’ to be performed each time and switching themes is also a pain. I would add that on theme switch there should be a built in way to regenerate the thumbnails..

Also the Page/Post template selection.. there should be a way to make it before start editing the Page/Post this way would be possible to customize the experience with template specific metaboxes/blocks..

I mean it is possible to do it right now with the help of external libraries like CMB2 but after selecting the template you have to publish the post and then you will be able to find the template specific metaboxes.. not the most intuitive workflow.